


Collecting Every Ray Into His Kind

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [13]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, Folly Dads, Found Family, M/M, Medical School, Selkies, medical residents are adorable, water is always dangerous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-19 07:46:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12406098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Fatherhood had rather crept up on the both of them – if you could even call it that. The selkie and police officers in question might have had something to say about the idea of them being ‘parented,’ after all.





	Collecting Every Ray Into His Kind

**Author's Note:**

> By request: more Agatha! (See the previous fic in this series for how on earth she joined the madness.) And some Folly Dads feels, because I had to. *g*

* 

**Spring, 2016**

It took surprisingly little effort to get Agatha the Selkie (as she would always be known in Abdul Walid’s mind) settled in London. Her enrollment at UCL Medical took only a couple of phone calls, and hardly put a dent in the medical-social capital he had amassed over the years; settling her, at least temporarily, into one of his spare bedrooms at Albert St took no time at all given she had brought nothing with her. Beverley Brook and Sahra Guleed took her under their wings on her first weekend, and got her sorted with everything she’d need to wear and use as a young woman and university student – which Walid could only confess he didn’t have the slightest practical knowledge of – and her welcome to the Folly followed apace, with them spending most evenings there in the weeks before her term started. She bonded instantly with Molly, in particular, who took with relish to the task of supplying Agatha with the raw fish she tended to prefer eating, which meant Walid often came back to the Folly after one of his shifts to find them both gulping Dutch herring whole from nose to tail, dripping with diced onions. It smelled horrible but, he was told, tasted delicious – if you were into that sort of thing.

The Folly felt young and alive that spring in ways that even Walid was unfamiliar with, as the gloom that was Lesley’s betrayal continued to lift and the Faceless Man stayed out of sight. In the wake of their Scottish adventure and with a new friend to tutor in the ways of the world – literally – Beverley and Sahra were often to be found in the coach house at the Folly, watching Agatha watching television and explaining to the best of their ability what it was that was important about _Love Island_ and the Great British Bake Off. Abdul personally brought round what would be her first experience with a takeaway from down the street, nudging away Nightingale’s thieving fingers from the kebabs until their guest had had first pick. Peter snarked at them all from his proprietary end of his sofa and insisted on spending an entire evening explaining the offside rule to Agatha (who seemed none the wiser, and incredibly bored by the whole lecture); Thomas, surprisingly, had more luck with tutoring her in rugby, which apparently looked more like the Scottish ball-sports she had occasionally witnessed in muddy fields near Oban, and made himself quite insufferable when he got her to agree to support Harlequins.

In the week before she started term, she and Walid spent some time more quietly at Albert St, making sure all of her documents and books were in order. She had given them all a bit of a blank stare when they had tried to determine her age the month before: in the end, the identity documents that were made up for her, on the Folly’s dime (Miriam Stephanopoulos had shouted at Nightingale for quite some time about how much trouble she was going to be in if it was discovered she had invented a new UK citizen from whole cloth, but she, and the Home Office, had come through in the end) said that she was twenty, and had been born in the Hebrides.

Getting her ready for her courses took rather more time, as there was a lot of vocabulary to learn and her reading skills were idiosyncratic at best. But she had a bright and bluntly-enquiring mind which soaked up information at a speed which Walid couldn’t help but envy, and when they finally packed up all of her records and notebooks for her first day of term he had no hesitation in pouring her a glass of wine from the small store of bottles he kept for guests and toasting what he had no doubt would be her future success. She laughed at him a bit when he sat to relax with an old The Who CD on his stereo – her sense of what was modern enough to be tolerated had developed rapidly – but she seemed happy enough as she wandered around the sitting room with her glass, clearly excited, peering at his collections of books and records for something to do.

“Your clan?” she said, pointing at the little collection of photographs he kept on a middle shelf of one of his bookcases.

“Yes,” Walid said, levering himself out of his chair slightly to see which photo of his family she was looking at. “From about a decade ago, before my mother passed. You’d like them – most of them are still in Oban.”

“And this,” she said, her eyes narrowing – she had picked up the only photo Walid kept of him and Thomas together. It had been taken in 2005 at a police function, rather late in the evening, and the tailored suits and uniforms of their surroundings had lent a certain elegance to the snapshot someone had caught of them talking to each other at their table. “You and the wizard are bonded, then?”

“Yes – for many years.”

She nodded, and put the frame gently down again. “So they aren’t your brood,” she said curiously. “Peter and the others, I mean.”

“No, not as such,” Walid smiled.

“Aye,” she said kindly. “So ye say.”

The concept of family probably meant something a little different to a creature who had – according to a subsequent, very detailed conversation they had about selkie reproductive cycles – been born from spawn, but that didn’t mean her assumption carried any less emotional weight, or meant any less to Walid. And nor did it mean he felt anything less, startling himself, like a horrified parent when, one morning early in February, he checked his various mobiles and pagers after a lesson at UCH to find that he had received a rather frantic-sounding voicemail on his personal number.

“ _Hi, is this Dr – Haqq Walid?_ ” the voice on the other end of the line said. “ _I’m calling from the Student Central at UCL. A girl named Agatha asked us to contact you – there’s been an incident at the swimming pool._ ”

A lifeguard met him at the entrance to what had formerly been the student union and led him down into the bowels of the building, where a dozen or so students were swimming laps and splashing each other in a shimmering Olympic-sized pool. Agatha, however, was nowhere to be seen – until he was taken to the entrance of the women’s changing rooms and saw her sitting in a corner, shivering under her lank hair. She was wearing a stretchy swimming costume in a garish pattern of green and black, probably the first thing she had grabbed off a rack in Primark, but that cheapness wasn’t what concerned him – it was that she was splotched all over in angry red and pink, as though she had been splashed with acid.

“I just wanted t’swim,” she said miserably.

“ _Ya elahi_ ,” he said, genuinely shocked, and quickly crossed the changing room to kneel down and take her chin in his hand so he could tilt her face upwards; her eyes were swollen and puffed red, and blisters were spreading visibly across much of her pale skin. “How long were you in the water?”

“A couple of minutes,” she rasped, her voice rough – the chlorine poisoning was closing up her throat. “It burns.”

“We’ve got to get you to A&E – ”

“No,” she said fiercely, and caught a strong hold of his wrist; her skin was hot enough that he could feel it pulsing against his. “I cannae. They’ll lock me up.”

“I’ve got ways of hiding things. No one wants to hurt you,” Walid said, trying to soothe her, but she only grew more agitated, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

“I cannae,” she said again, desperately. “They paraded us through the villages, gave us t’men who did nae understand.

“Chopped up our skins,” she sobbed, and then she stopped, so petrified she was unable to keep going, and Walid could only sigh.

“Alright,” he said, quieter. “I suppose it would be a bit much to try and keep those secret, even on my home turf,” he added, turning her head to take a brief look at the gills which were suddenly so prominent on either side of her neck – they, too, were inflamed and twitching in pain. “Let’s get you back to the house, and I’ll make some calls.”

It took a few minutes of slow movement to get her dry enough to get back into her clothes and gingerly get her out to the curb under his arm; he deflected the worried questions of the lifeguard with a confident explanation of cramp and an allergic reaction, and then, once they were in the back of the nearest cab and Agatha was huddled into his shoulder, spent the first few minutes of the ride scrolling through the contact list on his phone, wondering who he could trust.

“Hi, Jack? This is Dr Walid. Yes, really. Look, I need a favor – delivery of a few supplies to my home. Saline IVs and rally packs to cover three days, bath sponges, antibiotic soaps. An oxygen tank if you can swing it – and throw in some activated charcoal. Yes. 32 Albert St, NW1. Sign it all out with the code ‘METFAL16,’ and if anyone from the police calls about it, give them my name.”

He hung up in the middle of a very long, surprised silence on the other end of the line, and got back to concentrating on making sure Agatha was breathing slowly and evenly. Once back at the house, he had to take on rather more of her weight than he would have liked as he got her up the front steps, into the ground-floor bathroom, and got her stripped, with a brief stop at the toilet so she could vomit up what was no doubt now a nauseously contaminated stomachful of that morning’s breakfast. She had complained, since arriving in London, that the water in the house’s cistern tasted of metal; this time there was no protest forthcoming as he sat her down in the bath and turned the shower onto cold above her to wash away as much of the chlorine from her skin as possible.

The doorbell rang just as Agatha was starting to perk up a little, or at least as she was able to start opening her eyes again, and Walid left her to continue soaking as he went to answer it. Jack Wu, one of his senior residents, was on the other side, looking awkward as he hefted the bag of medical supplies under his arm – tall and handsome, he was one of those sorts of future doctors who would never have the best bedside manner, but would always provide the best care. Walid had liked him from the moment he’d managed to ask a complicated question about laparoscopy technique in his first tutorial at UCH, and he’d only climbed in Walid’s estimation since. It wasn’t ideal to involve an outsider, of course, but when it came to sneaking medical equipment out of hospitals and into places it shouldn’t really be, he couldn’t exactly have asked the Folly for help.

Jack looked him up and down. “So, not for you, then, Doctor,” he said, sounding relieved.

“No,” Walid said, inviting him in and then gratefully taking the proffered stash of IV bags and bottles. “My niece, unfortunately. Bad case of chlorine contamination.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Jack frowned. “Anything I can do to help?”

“If you have a minute, there might be.”

He went back into the bathroom while Jack, no doubt indulging in a little curiosity about one of his instructors, wandered into the living room to wait; the bath sponges and the soaps made Agatha hiss at their sting as he handed one to her and went to work himself on cleaning her back, but he could at least promise her that after they’d finished washing her down, she could be allowed to go to bed.

Wu blinked and blushed a little, probably despite himself, when, wrapped up in several towels, Agatha tottered out of the bathroom on Walid’s arm, but thankfully didn’t bat an eyelid when Walid said that she should be moving as little as possible, and that carrying her up the stairs to her room was a job for a man younger than he. Walid followed them up as Agatha laid her head on Jack’s shoulder and sighed, and then set her up with one of the rehydration saline packs, hanging the IV bag and its cord over the nearest bedpost.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” he said, smiling, as her eyelids fluttered up at him. “Next bath in two hours.”

“Fuck,” she groaned, and put her splotchy face under the duvet.

Jack was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, his discomfort clearly overtaken by worry. “I can bring an oxygen tank out tonight,” he said as Walid came down towards him. “Is there a reason she’s not in A&E?”

“Her parents are Christian Scientists. It’s not my first choice either, but she insisted.” This lie was harder for Walid to consciously say; the idea that Agatha was his niece had been easy enough to spread about since December, given the similarities of their coloring and place of origin, but this – this felt precarious, and he didn’t much care for it.

“Huh,” Jack said. “So, um – your family’s Scottish, you’re Muslim, and you have a Christian Scientist sibling?”

“Yes, it’s gotten rather confusing,” Abdul shrugged, with a tight smile. “The current crop of Wilsons are theologically adventurous.”

Jack nodded, looking more and more bewildered. “And, the, uh – ”

He gestured vaguely to his own neck above his white coat, clearly referring to Agatha’s gills, and Walid mentally scratched his head, wondering how on earth he was supposed to get out of this one. “Not for me to say, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” Wu said, and went off looking rather like he’d been clonked over the head with an anvil. Walid couldn’t exactly blame him for it, either.

It was touch and go for a few days, but Agatha made a reasonable enough recovery once the inflammation in her throat and stomach had dissipated, and she started spending more and more time sulking over the state of her human skin, which took rather longer to clear. On the fourth day of her moping about the house, Walid asked Peter to bring the velvet-lined box containing her pelt over from the Folly (which he had thought would be by far the safest place for it to be stored), which performed wonders for her morale as she sat in the front living room and snuggled in it, despite the rather piquant side-effect of the smell of damp seaweed.

Jack Wu also came back twice in that week – once to bring the oxygen tank Walid had asked for, which did help Agatha sleep a little more comfortably at night, and once, apparently, because he simply wanted to. He also blushed rather a lot, and Agatha stared at him a lot as they had tea around Walid’s kitchen table, and when he left the second time Agatha watched him go down the street from the front windows.

“He’s an oriental, in’t he?” she asked, picking at one of the scabs dotted down her arms.

“British-Chinese,” Walid said lightly, reminding himself that there was still a ways to go before an possibly-ancient and definitely isolated Scottish selkie would understand modern London. “Grew up in Barnet, if I remember right.”

“Hm,” she said thoughtfully.

Wu had apparently gotten ahold of her mobile number, or she had given it to him, sometime in the following week when she went back to her classes, because before Walid knew it it was a Friday night and she was getting ready to go out, and looked rather pleased with herself as she told him it was Jack who was going to take her clubbing with a group of the mutual friends they’d discovered they had.

“Are you comfortable with all that?”

“Do I look uncomfortable?” she grinned, making rather a sharp point of it in her towering heels and flattering ensemble of miniskirt and macramé blouse.

“Not at all. Though I hope you don’t overexert yourself,” he added lamely.

“Alright, da,” she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes, and waved at him cheerily from the doorstep when she finally tottered out around ten.

“ _Welcome to my world,_ ” Thomas said, sounding perplexed, when Walid called him, as was his wont most nights, and told him where Agatha was. “ _Peter’s off with Beverley Brook this evening, too. I must say I don’t quite understand this new generation’s lack of need or desire for sleep_.”

“Well, perhaps we’re just forgetting what we were like,” Walid laughed, fondly remembering not a few nocturnal adventures of his own. “You’re not waiting up for them, are you?”

“ _Don’t be absurd,_ ” Thomas said instantly – then, after a suspicious pause, added “ _Are you?_ ”

“Maybe a bit. I imagine Jack might have questions.”

“ _Text me your impressions. I’m most intrigued._ ”

Abdul did make his way to bed around one in the morning, telling himself that he could afford to trust Agatha, and certainly to trust Jack, to remember that they were both consenting and intelligent adults. He slept deeply and woke late on the Saturday, and came downstairs to a silent house – and to Jack Wu sitting in his kitchen, looking rumpled but content.

“Dr Walid,” he said hurriedly, and got up from the kitchen table, straightening his jacket. His clothes didn’t look like they’d left him, at least, which took the edge off of Walid’s protectiveness, and Jack himself seemed eager to put him at ease on that score, too. “Agatha’s upstairs,” he said, rubbing sleep out of his face. “I wasn’t. You know – I didn’t,” he said, awkwardly, and then he couldn’t help but laugh at himself.

“Tea, I think,” Walid said, smiling as he went over to the kettle. “Anything you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes,” Jack said slowly. “Sorry. It’s doing my head in a bit.”

“She told you, I gather?”

“That she’s half-fish?” Jack said, and when Walid turned back to him he still looked a touch pole-axed. “Yeah. Though I’ve got to be honest, I’ve dated girls who’ve said madder things.”

“I know the feeling,” Walid said, setting the table with mugs. “I’ve never seen this discovery be easy for anyone.”

“Yeah,” Jack said again, nodding. “She also said you’re married to a wizard.”

“The demimonde tends to make it difficult to leave it,” Walid shrugged. “Luckily for me, Thomas is worth it.”

Jack fiddled with the handle of his mug, a shade of something darker coming into his face. “Where’s Agatha’s skin?”

Walid took a careful mouthful of tea. “In a safe place.”

“Okay,” Jack mused. “And you’re not – the arrangement isn’t – ”

“She’s free to go at any time, and do whatever she likes. In fact,” Walid sighed, “if it were up to me, she’d be home right now. But she wanted to come, and I had a debt to pay.”

“Right,” Jack nodded. “Not that – I mean, I’m not saying I don’t trust you, sir,” he went on, a bit rushed and a bit embarrassed. “It just all sounds a bit fucked.”

“It tends to. And it goes both ways – I’m sure we can both trust your discretion.”

“Of course.”

There was a haphazard pounding of feet from the stairs, and Agatha came into the kitchen in her pajamas, sleepy-eyed, pulling her messy mane of hair out of her face. “Morning,” she yawned. “Fuck’s sake, you’re nae threatening him over me virtue, are ye?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Walid said loftily, and felt it was wise to take his tea elsewhere as she plopped herself happily down in the chair next to Jack’s.

*

10:23am                              I think the kids are all right.

10:36am              I sense a modern reference.

10:38am                               Not to worry, it’s a good thing.

* 

Agatha moved out of Albert St at the end of summer term, when, after a few early weeks of struggle, her marks had improved to such an extent that she was flush with the success of being accepted into her chosen (and naturally obvious) specialty of dermatology. Several of her newfound friends in her course had chosen to stay in London over the summer after exams and find themselves a flatshare, and so it was, just as Abdul himself had done decades before, that the newest crop of starving students would set up shop in the capital together – though in Abdul’s day, he hadn’t had the advantage Agatha had of any rich friends who were willing to put their mates up in a swanky complex in Southwark, or a boyfriend who was more than willing to have her crash at his place in up-and-coming Shoreditch.

It seemed as opportune a time as any to host a farewell, and on June 17th, Jack came over a few hours before dinner was served to help Agatha pack; the front corridor of the house was full of suitcases and boxes by the time Nightingale, Peter, Beverley, Sahra, and, to Walid’s surprise, Molly, made their way inside. Agatha had tried her hand at making an extremely authentic haggis which only Molly proved brave enough to enjoy; the rest of the meal was more conventional, but, Abdul flattered himself, a lot more edible, and it did him good even through his growing melancholy to be sat with Molly on his one side and Thomas on his other and watch the identical smiles on Jack and Peter’s faces whenever they looked at their respective partners, which was extremely often.

The pack of youngsters got underway around nine, since Agatha wanted time to settle into her new room for a few hours before getting to bed. She went around the whole group of them in turn, giving hugs and kisses, with Jack waiting for her at the door of his car; she saved Abdul for last, and smelled of freshwater under her perfume, the result of having finally been taken for excursions in the far-safer waters of the Thames by Beverley once a week.

“ _M_ _òran taing, athair_ ,” she said, grinning, giving him a thorough kiss on the cheek which reminded him of Hogmanay and first-footing on New Year’s. “I’ll see you around campus, won’t I?”

“Of course,” he smiled, and just like that, with a wave and the closing of a door, she was off. Peter and Beverley, too, started away down the pavement back towards the Folly, with Beverley’s hand in one of Peter’s back pockets and Molly gliding serenely in their wake, and in the quiet left behind them, Abdul found himself feeling unexpectedly dull.

“Are you alright?” Thomas said, frowning at him in the low, summer evening light.

“I suppose,” Abdul sighed, not sure how to put what he was thinking into words.

“Oh,” Thomas said, surprise and pity in his voice. “You’re empty-nesting.”

“You don’t even know what that means,” Abdul said, amused through his sourness (and reminding himself to apologize later to Thomas for temporarily ignoring all the people he had seen come and go).

“Not to worry,” Thomas smiled, not reacting to the jibe as he reached down to take Abdul’s hand. “After all – she obviously can’t cook, so she’ll probably be back soon for feeding.”

“The haggis was delicious,” Abdul protested, deciding he would stand up for even the more unsavory aspects of Scotland, and pretending not to know what was happening as Thomas steered him gently back inside. “You southern softies just don’t know how to appreciate it.”

“Nonsense,” Thomas murmured, with the door shutting behind them and his hand sliding around Abdul’s waist. “I know full well how to appreciate northern things.”

 _When the children are away_ , Abdul thought, happy despite himself, and surrendered.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from James Thomson's _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton _(1732) again.__ Thanks for reading!


End file.
